Their Last Free Summer: How Four M1s Are Spending It

Four medical students— Lily Schmidt, Melia Patrick, Jonah Albrecht, and Anna Royer— talk through how they landed on their "last free summer ever" plans: research fellowships, a genetics scholars program, global health immersion in Ecuador, Colorado fourteeners, and the lingering question of whether any of it actually matters for residency. Jonah is off to Ecuador in part to avoid a lab. Lily is in a clinic implementing joint-capture software partly because she can't do chart review without going sideways. Melia is doing genetics because she actually likes the patient population. Sure, they're all deciding to do something med school adjacent. But they are exercising the option to choose the focus of their attention in this last summer of life at the margins of medicine.